On one particular island there is a small number of people who live on it. They have always lived on it. And in fact, always will. These people were never born, and will never die. They live for one purpose only, to expand the island. The island expands with every laugh, smile, twinkling in the eyes—any source of happiness. This island’s currency of energy is happiness, and these people are the source of it. The island will grow beautiful tall trees, perfectly tempered hot springs, awe-inspiring towering mountains, anything to increase the energy output of the people. The people have long since discovered that the island responds to the peoples’ moods, so naturally, the people strive for happiness every minute of everyday, because they enjoy the gigantic trees, the warm springs and magnificent mountains. But happiness obeys the same laws as everything else in the universe, it is temporary. Happiness is not unlike other behavioral phenomenon, it is still very fragile. The people have tried since the beginning of their time to find permeant happiness, but to no avail. It simply comes and goes. The island will transform any mountain, produce any sunset, grow any fruit, desperate to find the cure to the people’s periodic sadness. And just like happiness, sadness doesn’t stay forever either. They both come and go, with no pattern, no indication of a solution. And because of this the island shrinks and expands forever, reciprocating the happiness and sadness of the people it embodies. 

This island moves, and moves fast. Actually it doesn’t move per se, it surfs. The island is elongated, like the shape of a surfboard and is riding a monstrous wave, hundreds of miles wide and tall. The island is in constant motion, slowly bouncing up and down as it traverses stormy waters. Soaring down the nearly vertical face, traveling over thousands of feet of water per second, is a peaceful tribe living on this endlessly surfing island. The tribe has long since figured out that if they gather everyone to stand on one side of the island, they can control the direction the island surfs. This allows the tribe to control their weather and even the seasons. By placing weight on one side of the island, it can travel up the wave, gaining altitude and decreasing the temperature on the island. This is their winter.  If the island’s weight is centered and slightly forward, it will travel down the wave, approaching sea-level, and warmer weather. This is their summer. For as long as the tribe has been on this island, they have never seen the wave break, it has always maintained it’s huge, wall like shape. But this begs the question: Will it ever fall over itself, finally crashing on the island and dispersing itself throughout the water, ceasing to be a wave? Or will the island surf this endless wave forever? 

Everyone on this island is in a relationship with everyone else. It is one gigantic open relationship. People travel to this island with the intent of joining the relationship. Loving freely and openly with everyone and being able to experience countless different types of love with thousands of people is all a part of the appeal of coming to the island. As more people arrive on the island, the relationship grows in size and complexity, as does the island’s landscape. Because oddly, the island is a physical manifestation of the relationship. The island grows land mass, grows new mountains and geographical contours, becoming increasingly more complicated just as the relationship does. Growing and growing. Until one day, the relationship breaks. Too many people, too many emotions, too many mountains and too many valleys. The island ruptures, opening a deep abyss down the center of the island. Everyone falls into this abyss and the relationship goes with them. Swallowed by the island. Then, the island erupts, exploding out it’s land mass, shrinking in size, until it once again is a small, neatly compacted island, waiting for the next relationship.  

There is an old man. He lives in an old Victorian, two-story house that sits on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the ocean. The cliff itself is beautiful, a sheer drop, hundreds of feet straight into the ocean. Many people come from the town to visit this cliff, with the intention to never return back home. This is the only cliff on the island and people come here to jump off. End their loneliness, end their sadness, end their pain. The one town on this island, is a cold one, not in temperature but in demeanor. Everyone is selfish, mean to each other. Mothers judge daughters. Sons hate their dads. Spouses cheat on one another. This island entirely lacks compassion. Well, not entirely. The old man who lives on the cliff, is different than everyone else. He is a simple man, he likes his tea and his porch. He knows how the town is, how miserable the people make it, so he decided to move away. Now he lives in peace on the cliff, far from town, and watches people come to the cliff to end their lives. He almost always stops them. You see, these people don’t need much, they just want to be heard and understood. And the old man truly listens to them and has compassion for them, for the first time in their lives. The old man always asks the person, standing on the cliff facing the ocean, to close their eyes and listen. Listen to the sounds around them. Listen to their own breathe. He asks them to feel the ground under their feet and the wind blowing past their ears. The old man gives each person who comes to the cliff, a new set of eyes to see with. But all of this is in vain, for no one in the town ever talks about the old man or how close they were to ending their own lives, if it was not for him. So the meanest and coldness continues. Until one day, when something special happened. The old man died. He jumped off the cliff, killing himself. The entire town mourned, each person had a deeply private connection with this old man, he had saved their life and now, he was gone. The people shared their stories with each other, astonishment spread throughout the town. Disbelief grew. How was it that so many of them had tried to commit suicide? What had gotten them to be this way? Was the town always this cold? How was it possible this old man had saved so many people? The spark was ignited. And the fire grew. Compassion slowly spread throughout the town. Was this the old man’s final gift to them? 

On this island, the arrow of time follows the usual laws physics, with its speed relative to the frame of reference. But there is also an additional and unusual law of physics on this island. The speed of emotion. Your grandfather died yesterday, but emotionally you feel like he died 30 years ago. Emotion speeds up. Grudges are never held. Why would you be mad at something someone did when it feels like they did it 20 years ago? Emotionally healing and recovery will happen in seconds. 

Falling in love is different too, of course. Your love is almost always only a day or two long. How many people do you meet that you feel like you will love in 40 years? Three people? Maybe four people? But, when you do find these people, you fall in love instantly and deeply. Imagine falling in love with someone and the love feels old as time from the perspective of your heart.

All heartaches, only last a few days at the most. After what feels like hundreds of years, your heart patches and heals completely. You maybe wondering, what is the point? If everything we are, is what we feel, and our feelings vanish in the wind, what is the point of emotions if we only experience them for such a short time? 

Love traverses time, both emotionally and physically. It is the only phenomenon that exist that has the ability to be permanent. One cannot force love, there are much grander forces at play, which control such things as powerful as love. It is simply out of our reach. But thankfully, we can still experience love, even momentarily. 

An island where everything is permanent, every routine has stayed exactly the way it has always been. The people on the island do the same work they have always done, each person lives the life they have always lived. No variance, no deviation.  No one is born, no one grows old and no one dies. On this island, history is a straight line, no unexpected turns, no natural disasters. Completely permanent, in every way. It simply has always been. Until one random afternoon, when somebody dies, for the first time.

The people panic. How could this be? No one knew what it meant to die. Death did not exist, until now. Where did she go? Will she come back? How did she die? 

The people investigate, they stop the daily tasks and routines they have been doing since the beginning of time and examine this life changing event. 

For the first time, the people discover that there is no such thing as permanence. What they thought was a law of the universe, the ultimate truth, turned out to be false. It was a terrifying revelation, but also a liberating one. The people could explore themselves, each other and the island. The people threw an island wide party, they rejoiced at this moment in their history. The permanence revolution. They discovered the joys of living a life full of different experiences but also the fears of takings risks, breaking free of the prisoned life they had lived for all of time. A baby was born. Aging was discovered. Knew knowledge was found. 

What was never found though, was the cause of the first death, the first change in history. You see, her death was caused by permanence itself. The permanent routines, the permeant people and the permanent lives. Her death wasn’t unnatural, in fact it was long overdue. Because the state of permanence is unstable, like a ball balancing on top of a needle. There is only one state, only one place on the ball where it can balanced on the needle. But there are an infinite number of states where the ball is off balanced. It is only a matter of time before the ball will fall off. 

This island is simply a deep valley with a bridge across it. As usual, time is linear, always moving forward in one dimension. But on this island, so is space. There is only one path that everyone can walk. Everyone walks on the same spacetime bridge, just as everyone follows the same arrow of time. The path everyone is walking is the bridge that is suspended thousands of feet, across the valley. You are born on one end, walk across the bridge, following your own path and then when you reach the end of the bridge on the other side, you die. What is particularly interesting about this bridge, is its width. You see, time doesn’t have a width per se, but just because everyone follows the same flow of time, doesn’t mean everyone experiences the same moments of time. This bridge is no different, everyone walks across the bridge, people who are alive at the same time are all walking across the bridge together. Sometimes they run into each other, but sometimes, you can walk your own path along the bridge without seeing a soul.  So maybe, time is not one dimensional after all, maybe, it is an infinitely wide.

You may be wondering how old you were, when you first remembered reading this. Think back, where were you the first time?  Remember when you had this thought, last time you read this story? This story has a simple start.  And had a simply end. It started with a child, on a beach. His dad sitting next to him reading aloud while the child was building sand castles. It was an empty beach, with only the warm sunshine on your skin and a gentle breeze. The waves are crashing ashore. The child decides to build an island, made of sand.  As the waves break onto shore, water crawls up the sand and touches the island softly. The child is amused, you are an island creator! The child starts to expand the island, adding more sand, creating mountains and valleys, planting twigs for trees. He creates beaches around the island where to ocean ebbs and flows onto it. Just as the waves are lapsing onto this beach, ebbing and flowing with this tide. The child creates trenches around this island, that the ocean water slowly fills in. The child then creates more islands with each island having its own story to tell. 

The child, all grown up, had become a writer. He loved to write fictional short stories and read them to you at the beach while you built sand castles and islands. 

There's an island where sound never fully fades away. Every word ever spoken—kind or cruel, wise or foolish—stays suspended forever in the island’s atmosphere. If you wander through the forest, you might hear glimmers of a secret two friends shared with each other yesterday. When you pass by the schoolhouse, you'll likely catch the aftermath of a playground fight from twenty years ago. This island is filled with all the words anyone has ever said, drifting and layering into a mesh of voices that never goes silent.

At first, the people there enjoyed the endless chorus. They smiled when they heard lullabies from ages past and they paused to think about promises that still drifted through the air. But they soon learned the true cost of this gift. Whenever you tell someone, "I love you," that warmth endures forever. Similarly, if you tell someone, "I hate you," those words settle in right beside the words of love. The two feelings do not cancel each other out but instead they remain locked together. The echos taught the islanders that all hearts held contradictions—that everyone could be both kind and cruel, sure and uncertain.

In time, the islanders started to adapt. While some took a vow of silence, the vast majority chose instead to be more thoughtful with their words, knowing that their voices carried far beyond the present moment. And even though they could never erase old words, they always had the power to add new ones—apologies beside accusations, understanding beside confusion, forgiveness beside regret. Over time, their voices wove together intricate patterns of layered meaning. Love and hate, truth and lies, pain and healing, all remained (and still do!), coexisting in the air. On this island, speech is both a permanent record and a chance to shape the future. A reminder that we aren't defined by any single word or feeling, but by the evolving chorus we create over a lifetime.

- Vince Coppola